For the second year running, Deloitte is awarding a top 200 company that recognises that developing diverse talent results in a significant business advantage.
Entries are now open for the Diversity Leader Award as part of the Deloitte Top 200 awards. The award will honour an organisation that has made a significant commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion throughout its business – and one that has been innovative about how it goes about it. Global Women worked with Deloitte to introduce the new award category last year and the inaugural winner was BNZ – read about how they won it here.
CEO Deloitte New Zealand Thomas Pippos says a greater focus on diversity by our most successful companies helps spur economic growth while underpinning important social change for New Zealand.
“Embracing diversity in all its guises, linked with an inclusive culture, can be a powerful strategy for driving competitive advantage,” says Pippos.
Deloitte believes organisations that draw on diverse points of view are better able to make robust predictions and solve the complex problems that face business today and in the future.
Global Women chair Sue Sheldon says achieving diversity is reliant on a leadership approach that embraces breadth and depth of thinking at senior levels within business, and examples of this should be celebrated and recognised.
This year’s Deloitte Top 200 judging panel includes Neil Paviour-Smith, Sandy Maier, Dame Alison Paterson and Cathy Quinn, and the panel will be facilitated by Fran O’Sullivan. For the Diversity Leader Award, the judges will be assisted by specialist advisors who are yet to be announced. Following judging, finalists for the Diversity Leader Award will be contacted by the end of October, with the winner announced at the Deloitte Top 200 Awards held on Thursday, November 26, 2015 at Vector Arena in Auckland.
With great uptake of the inaugural Diversity Leader Award last year, Deloitte is looking forward to a continuation of top quality submissions for 2015.
“Diversity – of ideas, of talent and of markets – is no longer a nice to have; rather it’s a prerequisite for organisations that want to stay ahead of the pack, even more so in the city of sails with the ever changing face of the growing population,” says Pippos.
Diversity covers gender, age, religion, language, education, disability, sexuality, work style, thinking style and personality type, and much more. Inclusion is how you work with this diversity and leverage it in your business. If you’re a top 200 organisation, responsible for diversity and inclusion and interested in applying for the award, contact Deloitte for an application form, to be submitted 5pm Wednesday 30 September 2015